Briefs

December 12, 2001 - Roche Bioscience and Pharsight Corporation (Nasdaq: PHST) today announced that the two companies have entered into an agreement to collaborate on linking Roche's "Digital Disease" genomics discovery platform to clinical drug development through application of Pharsight's modeling and simulation expertise and software tools. The agreement will allow Roche to explore the influence of genetic analysis on the design of clinical trials and drug development programs. Ultimately the results of this work should help researchers devise strategies enabling treatments to be more precisely tailored to a patient's unique physiology.

Under terms of the agreement, Pharsight will provide consulting services to develop models that relate drug treatment to clinical outcome, based on identified genetic difference characteristics in the human population. The initial modeling and simulation will use information from Roche's mouse "Digital Disease" genomics discovery platform (Science. 2001 292:1814-5) to identify the genetics traits influencing drug efficacy. These models will be used to simulate clinical trials, based on the Pharsight Trial Simulator software, to explore alternative trial design, and to assess how to best incorporate genetic analysis into the trial design. Roche will identify and test the optimal design to validate the use of Pharsight's modeling and simulation methodology, linking genetic analysis with clinical drug development. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

For additional information, see http://www.pharsight.com/news/releases/pr_011213.htm